Americans have hated tipping almost as long as they’ve practiced it

Over the past few years, tipping has gotten complicated. The rise of touchscreens presents an opportunity to tip 18, 20, or 22 percent for everything from a cup of coffee to a candy bar. Yet all this tip creep flies in the face of the media narratives that prominent restaurateurs were leading the way to abolish the practice. Tipping seems to be at a tipping point.

The history of tipping in America, however, is awash in seeming tipping points; the result has always favored tipping. Ever since the practice was introduced by worldly travelers after the Civil War, it has succeeded like the best of invasive species, resisting all efforts to stamp it out.

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Scholars are still debating why the strange practice of voluntarily handing over extra money is so persistent in America, especially in the restaurant industry. But they agree tipping will likely be with us for a long time.

The origins of tipping

Tipping has its roots in vails, small monetary gifts given by English aristocrats to their servants in the late Middle Ages. These started out as a means of rewarding extra work, or helping out in hard times. By the 18th century, servants at country houses and inns expected these gifts from guests, and sources at the time complained of the cost.

According to cultural historian Kerry Segrave in Tipping: A Social History, the practice only took off in America, however, after the Civil War, when Americans began to travel to Europe in greater numbers. Under the influence of the Gilded Age, these newly well-off Americans imported the aristocratic practice.

Some employers used tipping to keep wages low, most notoriously the Pullman Palace Car Company, which openly admitted to paying sub-living wages to their porters because they received tips.

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There’s been much debate about whether racism drove the tipping movement in the United States. All Pullman porters were Black, and their low wages were undoubtedly driven in part by racism. It’s not clear Americans understood tipping to be racist, however racism pervaded American society, and so racism influenced how people tipped. Plenty of white workers were tipped during this era, too, and Segrave also recounts the incidents of white Southerners who refused to tip Black workers.

The first backlashes against tipping

As soon as tipping began to spread in America, so did opposition to it. Journalists in the late 19th and early 20th century frequently described tipping as un-American, and the tip itself as something bestowed upon a social inferior, which flew in the face of democratic values. Of special concern were college students accepting tips at summer jobs, because this marked them for “servility.”

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Organized labor leaders also opposed the practice, even if their rank-and-file benefited from tips. By the turn of the 20th century, an anti-tipping movement had managed to outlaw the practice in several states, including Iowa, South Carolina, and Tennessee in 1915.

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The writer William Scott, who opposed tipping so vociferously he wrote a book about it, blasted the practice of tipping waiters as a means for restaurant owners to shift their labor costs onto their customers. He called tipping, “a cancer on the breast of democracy.”

But democracy did not agree. By 1926, all anti-tipping laws were off the books. And in 1938, tipping was enshrined in American law with the creation of the minimum wage, which included a separate, lower tipped minimum.

Modern tipping culture

After World War II, tipping waned in the United Kingdom and across Europe as restaurants replaced tips with service charges. But the war did nothing to dislodge the practice in America, making the country that had imported tipping its main proponent.

Since the 1950s, economists and psychologists have been arguing over tipping’s role in American society. Some theorize that people enjoy the feeling of importance; others suggest that people tip out of fear of social disapproval. W. Michael Lynn, a social psychologist who has studied tipping throughout his career, argues in his research that it might have begun as a means for some people to buy special treatment— then, when tipping became common, it instead put non-tippers at a disadvantage, creating an unbreakable cycle.

One or two prominent restaurateurs occasionally make headlines by abolishing the practice, but the tip-free movement never spreads. Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell, says that it’s difficult because consumers like the alternatives to tipping less. “For restaurants to get rid of tipping, the two options they have are to either replace it with service charges, which everyone hates, or raise menu prices, which most restaurants have difficulty doing since competitors continue to have lower menu prices, and doing so collectively would be price fixing.”

What is known is how much tipping doesn’t do. Research has found that tips are not used to reward good service, or punish bad service. People tip even if they don’t expect to ever return to a restaurant, and the only determinant of the size of the tip is the size of the bill—people tend to tip smaller percentages on bigger checks. Racism and sexism influences how much people tip too.

Lynn says that his research has found that, for now, most people are not tipping for pickup or other counter-service-type meals, even if the iPad is spun their way—and this includes him.

“I know that the person I’m picking food up from wants a tip, and will be unhappy if I don’t give it to them, but I know that two thirds of people don’t tip, so I’m not the only person they’re going to be pissed at,” he says. “If we tip in those situations, we need to start tipping any kind of retail employee, and I’m not willing to go there.”

He knows better than most that once we do go there with tipping, it’s hard to go back.